With the advent of the World Wide Web, a vast amount of information has been made available to a large group of users. With the increasing amount of information that is made available to users, this makes it increasingly difficult for users to navigate through all the available information.
To allow users to locate information on the World Wide Web, a number of search engines (e.g., Google, Yahoo, etc.) have been developed and provided. A search engine is a program that searches web pages for specified keywords or search terms and returns a list of web pages where the keywords were found. For example, a user looking for information relating to “consumer reports on Honda Minivans” generally receives a list of hyperlinks to web pages with some or all of those words in them. Search engines will normally look in their entire database of target websites for relevant results, generate a list of hyperlinks to particular web pages, and rank the list in order of relevance. Alternatively, a user can obtain information by directly accessing a particular web page or using a search engine to conduct a search on an individual website.
However, search engines are often less than precise and a user typically needs to peruse and sort through a large amount of information to find the information or portions of the information that the user is looking for. As a result, a user generally misses the desired information that is buried in the search results. This problem is applicable to any collection of information or records.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide systems and methods that overcome these and other deficiencies of the prior art.